Tag Archives: Raftery

In my last post on 11 April 2016 I looked at starvation and destitution in the Castlerea area during the Famine. But although thousands left the district to escape immediate hunger and destitution, many others were forced out in other ways that are the subject of this post.

Eviction by landlords was a scourge during the Famine years. Many of the local estates were badly-managed and semi-bankrupt before the Famine, whilst on others landlords had already been removing tenants from the smallest holdings and stopping the annual lease of patches of land for basic subsistence (conacre). With the collapse of food supplies and the inability of many tenants to pay rents, the Famine provided a golden opportunity for landlords to get rid of smallholders and conacre plots.

Famine evictions started early in the Castlerea district and the area was the scene of one of the most notorious ‘exterminations’ to take place in Ireland during these years – the Gerrard case near Mount Bellew, Co. Galway, that I described in my post on 17 June 2015. Sixty-one families were violently thrown out of their houses and left to fend for themselves. Dramatic as the Gerrard eviction was – and the word ‘Gerrardising’ became commonly used for evictions in this area during the Famine – it was only one case amongst many. By August 1846 the Roscommon Journal was saying eviction was ‘the order of the day’ and in January 1848 the Journal reported some of the consequences. The Poor Law Guardians were refusing the take more people into the Roscommon Workhouse, and

‘so early as seven o’clock our streets were studded with creatures almost dead or dying. … Affected with contagious fever, young and old were huddled together. … The wailing and dying moans of the unfortunates as they were obliged to wend their way back to their respective localities was truly heart-rending. Homes they had none, friends they had not any, and food they had no hope of getting. Several of them died before they left the town, and hundreds, unable to quit the streets, are strolling about black with fever. This is the fruit of last year’s extermination. This is the result of the ‘Gerrardising’ of 1847.’[1]

Eviction during the Famine: the memorial to the victims of the Gerrard eviction at Ballinlass, 1846

A year later the paper summed up the results of evictions:

‘The crusade against the Tenantry in this part of the country is daily increasing. … Depopulation has now become so general it excites not the least surprise or astonishment to hear of hundreds being daily turned into the ditches to famish. … The tenant and small farmer … has fled to another and happier country. The poorer class have either perished or become inmates of the Workhouse. … The solvent and industrious tenants have emigrated.’[2]

The Poor Law system was a massive incentive for landlords to evict their small tenants. In April 1848 27 families, or 189 people, were evicted by a landlord near Castlerea.[3] These people were victims of the £4 clause in the Irish Poor Law Act which said landlords were responsible for paying the poor rates of tenancies valued at under £4 a year. Now that small tenants couldn’t pay their rents, landlords rushed to clear their properties of such people. They forced tenants to give up their land or, if they went to the workhouse, demolished their houses and made them totally destitute while they were away.[4]

Many other people were evicted by the workings of the Gregory clause, the provision introduced in June 1847 which denied poor relief to any tenant who held more than a quarter of an acre of land. On 23 June 1849 the Tuam Herald reported that there had been 94 ejectment cases at the quarter sessions that week, an ‘unusually large amount’. It blamed ‘the power of landlords and the Gregory clause’ and earlier had said

‘if any one doubt that the Gregory clause has produced these sad effects [he] should take a drive …into the country. … Evidence [is]…everywhere…[of] roofless cottages and the blackened walls and the desolate hearths which were once the humble but happy houses of a peaceable and contented peasantry.’ [5]

In my post on 17 February 2016 I looked the Raftery family from Co. Roscommon. They held 32 acres of land in Kiltullagh parish.[6] Because they had more than four acres they were directly liable for poor rates, and these rose dramatically as thousands of destitute and starving people sought relief from the Poor Law. The local press was very clear that the burden of the poor rate was now a major force driving people like the Rafterys to emigrate. In October 1848 the Roscommon Journal said that

‘The enormous expense attending the working of the machinery of the Poor Law, and consequent increased taxation, has had its blighting effects on this country. The tide of emigration bears ample evidence of the fact – the very bone and sinew of Ireland are crossing the Atlantic to seek in a foreign clime what has been denied them in their native land. ….Farmers are selling off the produce of the land to enable them to quit it.’[7]

The links between eviction, destitution and emigration were underlined by a report from Castlerea in 1849. Mr Auchmuty, the Temporary Poor Law Inspector, wrote that

‘The means of the poor are exhausted; they are in a most deplorable condition, some of the persons lately admitted are actually in a state of starvation; all employment, I may say, has ceased, the able-bodied are going to England in great numbers to look for employment, and leaving their families in the greatest destitution; there is fresh difficulty in discharging paupers from the workhouse who have been in the house for any length of time; they have no homes to go to, the moment they come in , their cabins are levelled by the landlords. There has been a great many evictions in this Union lately. ….it is astonishing, everwhere I go through the Union, to see how fast the cabins are disappearing.’[8]

Evictions went on beyond the normally accepted end of the Famine around 1850. Landlords, many of them newcomers taking advantage of the 1849 Encumbered Estates Act, continued to clear their properties of small tenants during the 1850s. Nearly 17,500 people were evicted in the Castlerea area between 1849 and 1856 and some of these victims continued to arrive in Stafford throughout the decade.

In 1850 the Tuam Herald made the important point that the

‘emigrants of the latter years are those who battled hard with circumstances…. [Emigration] results from long and painful calculation, and the reasons given are “they can hold out no longer”, “landlords will not give fair reductions of rents”, ”taxation is impossible to bear”. ….Every day witnesses the departure of whole families who only regret they did not go three years ago. … The class of small farmers and cottiers, who made a livelihood by mere tillage, can hold out no longer.’[9]

Most of tenants who emigrated because of rising poor rates, landlords’ refusal to reduce rents and a generally hopeless view of the future decided to go to America. There were, nevertheless, families or individuals who ended up in England either by choice or the force of unfortunate circumstances. The continuing inflow of people from the Castlerea district to Stafford in the 1850s underlines the fact that there were different, if limited, options.

In my post on 28 July 2015 I looked at Patrick Corcoran’s family from Castlerea. Patrick worked as a joiner. Around 1855 he, his wife Catherine and their children emigrated to Stafford, and his move illustrates another reason why people were forced out of Ireland during the Famine and its aftermath. Corcoran’s occupation depended on getting work in the building trade. The Famine undermined many small to medium-sized farmers, as well as those landlords whose estates were effectively bankrupt. These people now had neither the need nor the money to pay craft workers for their services, so people like Patrick were in turn impoverished. Many had to emigrate. It seems clear that Patrick used existing connections to make Stafford his bolt-hole rather than the more uncertain option of emigration to America. He may, of course, been so poverty-stricken that the cheaper English option was the only one open to him anyway.

In 1849 the Mayo Constitution described the Famine’s impact on the various classes in that county:

‘The small farmer class are suffering the greatest hardships, denied out-door relief because they cling with tenacity to their little holdings. …. The hitherto extensive farmer and grazier class, once the most important grade in the country, are swept away between Poor Law taxation and destructive free trade. The merchant and tradesman are one by one passing away into utter oblivion….’[10]

Many of those who emigrated early on could help other family members later by sending money for their travel as well as information and promises of support. During the worst of the Famine families ruthlessly tore themselves apart. Destitute wives sought relief from the Poor Law authorities because they had been deserted by husbands who had gone to England or America. This claim of ‘desertion’ was often used to get relief before money arrived from abroad and in 1849 it was said ‘the able-bodied are going to England in great numbers to look for employment, and leaving their families in the greatest destitution.’[11]

Despite North America’s dominance as an emigrant destination it was still unattractive for some and the closer option of England was less risky. The local press publicised evidence of emigrant scams, shipwrecks and hardships in its campaign against emigration and oppression by the Poor Law and the landlords.[12] It is impossible to say whether this had any effect in directing some people to England rather than the New World, but it may have done. The opening of the railway from Chester to Holyhead in 1851 opened up a faster and less sickening passage to England. That would certainly have made the trip to Stafford a more attractive option for those with the money, connections and will to go there.[13]

During the Famine and its aftermath the people who ended up in Stafford were an infinitesimal part of the emigrant tide but there were logical reasons for their arrival in the town. Irish settlement in the diaspora was by no means a process of completely random and panic-stricken movement, as is sometimes suggested. The contacts developed through seasonal harvest work before the Famine opened the way for larger numbers to settle there during and after the Famine disaster.

In my last two posts (17 February and 22 March 2016) I looked at the Raftery families who settled in Stafford in the nineteenth century. The first of these, the ‘Roscommon Rafterys’, were in many ways classic Famine emigrants, destitute people forced out of Ireland at the height of the Famine in the dreadful year of 1847. This post, the first of two, looks at what was happening in the area of about fifteen miles radius round the town of Castlerea, Co. Roscommon. It encompassed the north west of Co. Roscommon and adjacent areas of Cos. Galway and Mayo and it suffered extreme population loss during the Famine.

By the mid-1840s a scattering of people had already gone to Stafford from the Castlerea district. I looked at the reasons why in my post on 26 August 2015. Each year they were joined by harvesters from the area and this pattern might well have carried on for decades. The Famine changed all that. Even the small town of Stafford was to feel the impact, and the link between the Castlerea area and Staffordshire proved to be vital for many of the Famine’s victims.

On 23 September 1845 it was reported that around Ballinrobe, Co. Mayo, ‘The potato crop … is both ample and good … bountiful and healthy.’[1] At the same time the first reports were coming in from eastern Ireland of a new disease affecting the crop and on 20 October a constabulary report from Ballaghadereen, Co. Roscommon, said that ‘incipient disease of the potato crop has shown itself in a partial way in this district within the last few days.’[2] Two weeks later the rot had become general, ‘there being no instance in which the crop has wholly escaped the infection. … The general opinion, particularly since the wet weather has set in, is that at least one half of the whole crop will be destroyed before the first of next month.’[3] The deadly potato blight, phytophthora infestans, had arrived in the district.

As a direct result of the Famine the population of the Castlerea district fell from an estimated 255,779 in 1845 to 186,063 in 1851 – a loss of nearly 70,000. In other words, more than a quarter of the entire population disappeared from the area in just six years. Many people died from starvation, privation and disease, but large numbers also emigrated. It is impossible to say exactly how many because there is no accurate record of the people who died during the Famine, but between 30,000 and 50,000 may have died and 20,000 to 30,000 people emigrated from the Castlerea area during these terrible years.[4]

People emigrated during the Famine for five interlinked reasons. The first was the most direct impact of the Famine – starvation, destitution and inability to pay rent. This often triggered a second factor – eviction or the threat of eviction from the land because people couldn’t pay the landlords’ rent. In some parts of Ireland ‘landlord-assisted emigration’ – giving tenants money for passage to England or America – was a way of effectively evicting people, but the landlords of the Castlerea area were too poor, too uninvolved or too mean to adopt this approach. The third force driving people to emigrate was the impact of Poor Law forcing out small land-holders, a factor that became more devastating in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Fourthly, many people in secondary and tertiary occupation, such as carpenters, builders and traders, found their incomes disappearing as the Famine depressed the economy and demand for their goods and services dwindled. These four ‘push’ factors were increasingly complemented by the ‘pull’ force of contacts with people who had already left and sent money, information and prospects of help to those left behind.

The Tory government of Sir Robert Peel established a Relief Commission in November 1845 to organise food depots and respond to the efforts of local relief committees. [5] Local community leaders – magistrates, landlords, clergy – in the Castlerea area developed a comprehensive patchwork of such committees during the early months of 1846. The government made arrangements to secretly import Indian corn (maize) from America and from December 1845 schemes were developed to provide employment on public works. Wages of eight pence or ten pence a day were paid to men who could do this work but that was ‘insufficient to support themselves, much less their starving families.’[6]

Even the stored potatoes were destroyed by blight. In January 1846 it was reported from Lough Glynn in Tibohine parish, Co. Roscommon, that ‘within the last fortnight and even the last few days the potatoes in pits are nearly all diseased or quite rotten.’[7] This sudden loss of staple food immediately brought hunger to the masses and by March 1846 it was reported that there was ‘great distress’ in the Baronies of Dunmore and Tiaquin (Co. Galway) and that in the Barony of Castlereagh (sic) ‘the distress prevalent in the district (was) likely to increase’.[8] Conditions rapidly worsened during the late spring and in July 1846 it was obvious that the potato disease was striking the new crop even more virulently than the previous year. On 22 August the Tuam Herald reported the ‘total annihilation of the potato crop’.[9] At the same time the Whig Russell Government that had taken office on 30 June 1846 ordered the winding up of the Public Works programme. This took away the only sustenance for those with enough strength to work for the measly wages offered.

By the autumn of 1846 the Castlerea district was in the grip of starvation and destitution. Although the public works were restarted during the autumn, they never brought enough money to those most in need, and the local Famine Relief Committees reported harrowing starvation and death. William French, a member of a large landowning family in the Frenchpark area of Roscommon, wrote that

‘You can scarcely conceive the state of privation and misery to which (the populace) are now reduced in consequence of the great scarcity, the exhaustion of their means and the high price at which every article of food has arrived. I have actually seen many after spending their day in Frenchpark return in tears to their family without a particle of food, and latterly the men have become fierce and wicked, and disposed to commit outrage if their wants are not supplied. The works have not recommenced to any extent, but at all events no monies have yet been received for labour, so that I really fear for the lives of the weak and all those who are unequal to the struggle.’[10]

By November 1846 deaths from starvation were reported from Drumatemple, and a ‘population of 262 families (are) totally destitute of support’. Things rapidly worsened over the winter, so that on 14 January 1847 the secretary of the Ballintobber Relief Committee (Roscommon) reported ‘Thousands of persons are absolutely perishing through want. Sickness is making frightful havoc among them’[11] At Killererin (Killeroran), across the border in Galway,

‘at least two thirds of the population (are) without means. …. I know a family last week to shut themselves up in their house and let the parents and seven children lay down and give themselves up to death….and one poor widow who got three days refuge in a poor person’s house. When she left the house her daughter had to carry her on her back begging, and in that position she died and was taken dead off her back.’[12]

From all over the district starvation and death multiplied. In February 1847 Charles Strickland, the chairman of the Lough Glynn famine relief committee wrote of ‘the dreadful state of the poor in these districts. We are daily witnessing deaths of starvation which no means in our reach at present can avert.’[13] Localities dominated by absentee landlords were particularly suffering, and the reasons were sometimes linked directly to the land holding system. In Cloonygormican and Dunamon in Co. Roscommon it was stated that

‘The district is unfortunately circumstanced in its means of receiving relief. The landlords are, in almost every instance, absentees, and, from the proprietors of a large portion of the district, no relief is likely to be received as their estates are under the control of the Court of Chancery……Another circumstance which tends, in a great degree, to prevent us from receiving relief is the extent to which subletting has been carried on in the district, and on properties on which are the largest proportion of paupers.’[14]

In Kilcorkey and Baslick parishes (Roscommon) another aspect of the land system was emphasised, together with the vagaries of the public works programme.

‘This district …. is very large and from the circumstances of its being mostly a grazing country, the people were in the habit of living solely on the conacre system……The distress is still greater here owing to the suspension of public works in part of the district by the board who, to punish some persons who made an attack on one of their overseers, have thought fit to punish the innocent with the guilty for the span of more than one month. The provisions are so dear and scarce that the people are dying around me from starvation.’[15]

Week by week the local newspapers documented the suffering. In February 1847 the Tuam Herald wrote that ‘The condition of the people … is becoming daily worse. …. They are perishing in hundreds by the roadside. “Starvation inquests” are alas! still held in abundance.’ Three weeks later it poignantly described how, in the town, ‘the hearing of persons dying from want or destitution has now become as familiar to our ears as the striking of the clock.’[16]

By the beginning of 1847 there was a rising tide of emigration. On 23rd January The Times carried a report that

‘A gentleman, whose statements are entitled to the highest respect, gives a most deplorable picture of the condition of the county of Roscommon….He says that whole villages are depopulated, either by death or by the flight of such as have the means of transport to England, Scotland or America.’[17]

In April 1847 the Tuam Herald reported that ‘for some weeks past our town has been crowded daily with hundreds passing through, collected from all quarters, making their way to the nearest seaport where ships can be had to take them away from the land of their fathers.’ The paper took the view that ‘the emigrants are not those people who cannot find food or employment – they are the pith and marrow of the land – comfortable farmers who take all their means with them, leaving only the destitute behind them’.[18]

It was direct emigration to America from local ports like Galway City that most impressed local commentators, since these were the people who could afford to pay for their passage. Many of the emigrants from the Castlerea area going to America had to pass through Tuam town and these were the people crowding the streets in the Herald’s description. The route in the opposite direction was the one taken by the people who ended up in Stafford. In February 1847 a traveller from Roscommon to Dublin ‘passed on the roads crowds of young men, and not a few young women, and some children, journeying towards Liverpool with the intention of proceeding thence to America.’[19] The parallel with the plight of the refugees in Europe today is striking.

It is often thought that the emigrants who finished up in Britain were those too poor or dissolute to get to better destinations overseas – a kind of Irish residuum at the bottom of the social hierarchy. The Stafford evidence suggests a more mixed picture but many of the Famine arrivals were nevertheless destitute labourers and conacre holders. They had to flee whilst they had any means and opportunity to do so. Famine refugees began to appear in Stafford in April 1847 and the numbers reached their peak in the summer of that year. The most unfortunate – the starving, the destitute, the ill and the dying – ended up in the vagrant ward of the workhouse or the infirmary. Some of the families who settled in Stafford, like the Roscommon Rafterys, the Sweeneys from Galway and the Colemans from Knock, Co. Mayo, arrived in the town at the height of the Famine in 1847.

Catherine Coleman with her granddaughter Catherine Moore, Stafford, c.1900. Catherine Coleman had been born in Co. Mayo in 1835 and came to Stafford with her parents as a childhood refugee from the Famine.

In the autumn of 1847 the Catholic dioceses of Ireland carried out a ‘destitution survey’, asking parish priests to report on the consequences of the Famine in their areas. In the Castlerea district it was an appalling picture. On average the priests reported that around thirty per cent of the families were absolutely destitute with most of the others in severe want. Upwards of seven per cent of the population had died as a direct result of the Famine whilst around sixteen per cent of the families had already emigrated.[20] In the next post I’ll look at the other forces at work in the district during the Famine.

[1] L. Swords, In their own words: the Famine in North Connacht, 1845-49, (The Columba Press, Dublin, 1999), p. 18.

[4] Various attempts were made to produce figures for the number of deaths and emigrants in the Castlerea district using estimates and techniques adopted by analysts of the national and county impact of the Famine. The fact that the study area overlaps three counties complicated this process, but the main problem was that there is a bewildering variety of death rate estimates during the Famine coupled to problematic assumptions about the impact of the tragedy on the birth rate. The estimates of deaths in the Castlerea district produced by the various techniques ranged from 51,795 down to 21,929, but the majority lay between the low thirty thousands to the upper forty thousands. The resultant emigration figures mostly ranged from the low to the high twenty thousands, hence the figures given in the text. It is impossible to be more precise, important as the issue is. See S.H. Cousens, ‘The regional pattern of emigration during the Great Irish Famine, 1846-51’, Trans. Inst. Brit. Geographers, Second Series, 28, (1960), pp. 119-134; W.E. Vaughan & A.J. Fitzpatrick, Irish Historical Statistics: Population 1821-1971, (Dublin, 1978), Table 42; J. Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved, (London, 1985), esp. pp. 266-7.

[20] Usable reports of the Destitution Survey for the parishes of Kilcorkey, Fuerty, Elphin, Baslick, Ballintubber and Drumatemple were published in the Roscommon Journal on 30 October 1847. Those for Dunmore, Crossboyne, Ballaghadereen, Kilcolman and Castlemore were in the Tuam Herald on 13 November 1847.

In my last post I looked at the Raftery family who fled to Stafford from Kiltullagh, Co. Roscommon, during the Famine, and particularly at the sad life of William Raftery. This week we look at a second but unrelated Raftery family. They came from Co. Galway and they finally settled in Stafford in the 1870s, a point which emphasizes how Irish immigration was a long drawn out process.

These new arrivals were three Raftery brothers, Michael (b. 1836), James (b. 1842) and John (b. 1848). In the 1881 census John Raftery stated precisely where he was born – Glenamaddy in Co. Galway.[1] Glenamaddy was a very small town in the north-east of the county and in the 1850s Thomas Raftery held just one acre of land on its northern outskirts – plot 17 on the Griffiths Valuation map. Another relative, Timothy, held plot 1 on the map in partnership with two other men. Their land amounted to nearly five acres.[2] The three brothers who settled in Stafford may have been sons of one these men.[3] They had clung on after the Famine but were existing in desperate poverty on these minute holdings. They lived in the heart of the area which exported many of Stafford’s Irish settlers and the Raftery brothers had many connections in the town before they finally settled there.

Raftery land holdings in Glenamaddy, 1856, from the Griffiths Valuation survey.

They came to the Stafford district as early as 1862. At the beginning of September that year James and John Raftery were with a group of harvest workers who got involved in a fracas at the Greyhound Inn, Yarlet, to the north of Stafford. James was accused of assaulting a policeman, and the chairman of the bench ‘warned the prisoner and his fellow countrymen that they must not import that form of brutality into this country or they would be severely punished.’[4] He was fined 40s plus costs or one month in jail.

The three Raftery brothers presumably continued to come to Stafford for harvest work during the 1860s and they seem to have finally given up in Ireland and settled in the town around 1874. In doing so they left the land and worked as bricklayer’s labourers. Michael Raftery had married a woman called Margaret in Ireland, and they came with two surviving children, Matthew (b. 1861) and Michael (b. 1867). James and John arrived as single men, but they both married within a year and their marriage relationships were somewhat unusual. John Raftery married Margaret Hart (b. 1853) at St Austin’s on 29 September 1874.[5] Her father, Anthony Hart, was a Famine immigrant from Co. Galway. He worked as a farm labourer and almost certainly came from the same district as the Rafterys. More intriguing is the fact that Anthony Hart’s wife, Margaret’s mother, was Bridget Raftery! We know this from her sister Mary’s baptism record.[6] It seems that in Margaret Hart John Raftery was marrying a close relative, though how close it is impossible to say. John and Margaret Raftery set up house at 10 Snow’s (or Red Cow) Yard, the notorious slum court we have visited previously in this blog.

Snow’s or Red Cow Yard in 1880 from OS 1:500 plan 37/11/7, Stafford Borough. Note the Red Cow pub at the entrance with its malthouse and brewery behind the houses.

The following year (1875) James Raftery married Margaret Hart’s sister Mary. It was not Mary’s first marriage. Her first in 1869 was to a cowman, John McCormick, who in 1861 was working at Highfields farm outside Stafford. He must have decamped or died in the early 1870s and Mary tried again with James Raftery in 1875.[7] It seems the couple then lived for a time in Manchester since their first child, Bridget, was born there in 1875. They settled back in Stafford shortly afterwards and moved into no. 11 Snow’s Yard next door to John and Margaret. On numerous occasions down the years they were all involved in fights, drunkenness and ‘Irish Rows’ in the yard and around the Red Cow pub at the entrance.[8] These immigrants had replaced the poverty of rural life in Ireland with an impoverished urban existence in England from which the only relief was drink. Their houses, thrown up in backland near the River Sow in the late 18th century, were overcrowded and squalid, and in these conditions trivial incidents rapidly escalated into violence. They were living the same brutalized lives as thousands of other poor Irish – and British – families in Victorian Britain. Most of the conflicts were purely within the Snow’s Yard community but in 1902 Margaret was convicted of assaulting George Collins, a bailiff, in the Maid’s Head Vaults. She struck him twice in the face and ‘accused him of robbing poor people’. With good reason – he had taken goods from her four years previously under a distress warrant, presumably for non-payment of rent. The landlords of Snow’s Yard were notorious for charging high rents for lousy properties and tipping people out on the street with no compunction.

The Red Cow pub photographed around 1900 when it had been renamed the Falcon. The building dated back to the 17th century and was inherited by Justinian Snow in 1765. He built Snow’s Yard was down the entry to the left. (Picture courtesy of the late Roy Mitchell. Details from J. Connor, The Inns & Alehouses of Stafford, Part 2 (2014).

John and Margaret Raftery’s later life continued to be unstable, one symptom of which was frequent house moves. They got out of Snow’s Yard in the 1880s and lived in other slum houses in Stafford’s north end. They may have spent some time in Derbyshire since their son John was born there around 1887 but that was clearly a temporary move. In 1901 they were living at 75 Greyfriars, still close to Snow’s Yard. In September that year John Raftery was given a month in the gaol with hard labour for ‘a cowardly wife assault’. He made a savage attack on his wife who ‘had not taken proceedings against him before and did not wish to press the case now as he had promised to behave better in future’. That exposed the violence taking place within the family as well as outside it. John failed to turn up in court and the magistrates were clearly unimpressed by his wife’s cowed explanation.[9]

In the midst of such family stress John and Margaret brought eleven children into the torrid world of Snow’s Yard but six failed to survive infancy in such conditions. Margaret (b. 1880), Agnes May (b. 1884) and John (b. 1887) went on to marry but the subsequent whereabouts of Bridget (b. 1893) and Annie (b. 1895) are unknown. John married Jane Burton in 1913 and most of the people in Stafford today who retain the Raftery name are probably their descendants.

Margaret Raftery was aged around 66 when she died in 1918, a reasonable life span given the ravages of pregnancy, drink and stress.[10] John Raftery was still alive at that time; it is not known when or where he died. John and James’s brother Michael Raftery had died in 1880 – he didn’t survive long in Stafford.[11] His widow Margaret seems to have remained there with her two children for some time but nothing more is known about them except that Matthew (b. 1861) died in Stafford Workhouse in 1916.[12]

James and Mary Raftery went on to have at least nine children, of whom only four survived to adulthood. By 1901 three of them, Harriet (b. 1877),[13] Mary Ellen (b. 1881) and Agnes (b. 1883) had moved to Manchester and were living together in the Openshaw district. This suggests the family continued to have relatives or contacts in the city dating from the 1870s when James and Mary had been there. The move to Manchester got these young women out of their miserable Snow’s Yard environment. Agnes and Mary Ellen worked in a pickle factory, and Mary Ellen married George Adams, a railway worker, in 1907.[14] They went on to have a number of children and in 1911 were living in Wolverhampton. The subsequent history of James and Mary Raftery is unknown – they did not live in Stafford – but Mary finally died in the town in 1924.[15]

The Galway and Roscommon Raftery families lived separate but parallel lives in Stafford. By no means all Stafford’s Irish immigrants conformed to the stereotypical picture of Irish refugees, but the Rafterys in many ways did. Forced to leave Ireland, they struggled to make a living in the harsh world of Victorian England. They relied on casual manual work to keep body and soul together. They could afford nothing but the worst housing, and they often had to move from place to place; there was little stability in their lives. Life was a struggle and it brought its share of petty conflicts and violence, both stimulated and ameliorated by drink. Nevertheless, as time went on and new generations grew up the Raftery descendants who remained in Stafford took their place in working class society and progressively intermingled with it. There ultimately was no relict Irish community in Stafford. The Rafterys were people of Irish descent who added their distinctive character to the evolving social mix that characterised even this small town in Midland England.

[1] The name of the town can be spelt in many different ways, both historically and even today. The common form is Glenamaddy but the Irish Ordnance Survey uses two ‘n’s.

[2] National Library of Ireland, Griffiths Valuation of Ireland, Parish of Boyounagh, Township of Glennamaddy (sic), printed 1856. There were other Raftery families in Ballyhard and Stonetown townships some distance from Glenamaddy.

[3] Although the baptism register for Boyounagh RC parish (covering the Glenamaddy area) reveals many Raftery baptisms in the 1840s the three brothers do not appear. A church baptism cost 2s 6d and it may be that these Rafterys could not or would not pay the fee. Catholic Parish Registers, Boyounagh Parish, Co. Galway, 1838-65, Ancestry database, accessed 22 March 2016.

[6] Birmingham Archdiocesen Archive, St Austin’s registers, Stafford, P255/1/2. Mary Hart had been born around 1851 in Ireland, but the Harts must have moved to Stafford when she was a baby since she was christened at St Austin’s on 15 May 1851.

[7] Information from Maureen Jubb, September 2006. There is no record of McCormick’s death in Stafford but numerous men of that name died elsewhere in England during this period. The fact that James and Mary, as Catholics, married in the Register Office suggests they had something to hide. Stafford RD, marriages July-September 1875, 6b/26.

[8] For example, see SA, 13 February 1875, 4 September 1875, 11 September 1875, 19 May 1877, 4 June 1881, 5 May 1883, 14 September 1901, 25 September 1909

On 5 June 1886 the Staffordshire Advertiser carried the following story:-

“Family Affection”

“Mary Raftery, wife of James Raftery, 45 Broadeye [Stafford] was charged with assaulting Annie Raftery on 29 May and breaking four panes of glass in the house of Thomas Mann. The defendant pleaded guilty to the second charge. Annie Raftery’s husband was a soldier in the late Egyptian war. She is the defendant’s sister-in-law and lodges next door. Mary Raftery entered the house of Mrs Margaret Mann, called Annie Raftery bad names, knocked her under the table and beat her. Next morning Mary Raftery continued knocking at the door and then threw a jug through the bedroom window, breaking four panes. Mary Raftery said Annie Raftery was the aggressor but Mary Raftery was convicted and fined 5s plus costs or 14 days in prison and 2s 6d plus costs or 14 days for the second offence.”

Annie Raftery’s soldier husband – and Mary’s brother-in-law – was William Raftery. His life and that of his family shows the harder side of Irish immigrant life in nineteenth century Britain, even for those second generation Irish who were born in Britain. It also shows the problems of disentangling the evidence that has come down to us today. For a start, there is the name – Raftery. It could be spelt in a multiplicity of ways because its owners were largely illiterate and could not insist on a preferred version. Many of the people recording the name spelt it phonetically and they often confused it with the more common Irish surname of Rafferty. Modern on-line data sources have added to the confusion with inaccurate transcriptions of the name from the original documents. So identifying the correct Rafterys from a multiplicity of sources is a difficult detective job and it can’t be guaranteed that everything in this post has got it right. Even so, we can sketch the outline of William Raftery’s history.

William Raftery’s close family relatives

William’s parents were Thomas Raftery and Mary Tulis. They had been married on 20 May 1848 at St Austin’s RC Church in Stafford, and that marriage is the first evidence we have that the Raftery family had arrived in Stafford during the Famine. Both Thomas and Mary had been born in Co. Roscommon around 1821 and they probably knew each other back in Ireland. Like many of his compatriots, Thomas was a labourer but the couple supplemented their income by running a lodging house in Allen’s Court, a slum in the centre of town.[1] A year later, on 6 July 1849, a second Raftery marriage took place at St Austin’s when James Raftery married Bridget Cunningham. James was Thomas’s brother and in 1851 he was living at 17 Back Gaol Road with his in-laws from the Cunningham family and other lodgers. Seventeen Irish people were packed into this miserable cottage and another fourteen were at no. 18 next door. Among them were William, John and Ann Raftery, brothers and sister of James and Thomas. Also in the house was their widowed mother Catherine Raftery who had been born in Ballyhaunis, Co. Mayo, around 1795. William, Ann and John Raftery said they had been born in ‘Glintivly’, Co. Roscommon. There was no townland with precisely that name in the county but there was a locality called Glantives (nowadays Glenties) in Kiltullagh parish. This was at the north western tip of Roscommon where it meets Co. Mayo, and Ballyhaunis where Catherine was born was only about four miles away.

Before the Famine we know there was a Raftery family living in Glantives townland, Kiltullagh. The Tithe Applotment Books tell us that in 1833 Pat and James Raftery leased 31 and 32 acres of land there, and there were extensive Raftery holdings elsewhere in the parish. A Thomas Raftery & Co. held 23 acres of arable and pasture in partnership in Ballinlaugh townland about two miles from Glantives.[2] Thomas, James and the others were just the type of small tenants who were forced out of Roscommon in the dark days of the Famine. They probably ended up in Stafford because one or more of them had come to the district before the Famine to do seasonal harvest work.

These Roscommon Rafterys went on to produce a complex family in Stafford and elsewhere. Reconstructing their story is, however, further complicated because another Raftery family settled in the town in the 1870s. They came from Glenamaddy in Co. Galway and, despite the common surname, they were not related to Roscommon Rafterys and had no obvious dealings with them despite living similar poverty-stricken lives in Stafford’s slums. Disentangling these two families has been a knotty problem but their full story must await a later post. Today we return to William Raftery.

William’s childhood was spent in the miserable surroundings of Allen’s Court and Back Walls North. His lodging house home had a shifting cast of destitute Irish living on their wits to survive.[3] Violence stalked the surroundings. In 1861 William’s father was involved in a fracas in Back Walls and was fined for resisting the arrest of one of the other combatants.[4] With such a start in life and no schooling, William was destined to follow his father and brother James into the building trade. By the 1870s he was a plasterer but his work must always have been insecure and the lure of the pub was always there. He was fined at least twice for drunkenness and wilful damage and he must also have got into fights despite being a small man of slight build. [5] He bore the scars on both cheeks.[6] For a young man with no prospects the army was a way out, and sometime in the early 1870s he joined the part-time 2nd Staffordshire Militia. He was a classic militia soldier – a man in low-paid casual work for whom the money was useful and a periodic dose of army life a change from squalor, drudgery and insecurity.

With his Militia experience to call on William became a useful recruit to the full-time army and in 1876 he signed on for twelve years service.[7] He went into the Grenadier Guards and at the time of the 1881 census was stationed at Wellington Barracks in London, within a stone’s throw of Buckingham Palace. His army record form is incomplete but the military history sheet shows apparently continuous service in Britain. That is not the whole picture, however. By June 1882 he had completed six years full-time service and was transferred to the Army Reserve but on 4 August, just five weeks later, he was suddenly called back to the colours. This fits with him being sent to Egypt as Annie said in 1886. He must have been part of Sir Garnet Wolseley’s force of 16,000 that destroyed the nationalist uprising at the Battle of Tel-el-Kebir (13 September 1882).[8]

Foot Guards at the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, September 1882. William Raftery may – or may not – have been there. (Painted by Caton Woodville and in the Royal Collection)

His pensionable service record shows that after six months he was transferred back to the Reserves and sent to the Lichfield district. He was, in other words, back in Staffordshire. William was finally discharged from the army at the end of June 1888, having lasted for precisely the twelve years needed to earn him a military pension. He had gained little else from his period in the army. He never rose above a humble private and his conduct was described as ‘bad in consequence of acts of absence, drunkenness and insubordination.’[9] The army life had merely reinforced the habits of his youth.

We therefore know that William came back to Staffordshire and in 1886 had a ‘wife’ with him. But who was Annie? Despite diligent searches it is still impossible to say who she was and where she came from. There’s no record of William marrying anyone during his army service and the couple probably lived together in a fairly brief common law relationship. William’s brother James presumably got them a room in the Manns’ house next door but his wife Mary clearly disliked Annie enough to harass, abuse and beat her in 1886. After that Annie disappears from the record, not surprising given the squalid and fractious conditions William had found for her. William doubtless suffered all the problems of readjusting to civilian life that have become familiar amongst today’s ex-service personnel. He certainly didn’t stay on in the Mann’s house because in 1891 he was on his own and lodging in the Star Inn in Mill Street. There were nine other boarders packed in with him in this back street pub. He claimed to be working as a plasterer, his old occupation. From then on he went downhill and by 1901 he had sunk to the bottom. In that year he was a pauper incarcerated in the Cannock Union Workhouse ten miles from Stafford. He was less than fifty years old but described as ‘formerly plasterer’. The end came soon. He seems to have died in nearby Walsall in 1905.[10]

William Raftery’s life from being a child in the back streets of Stafford to his miserable end in the 1900s showed many signs of the dislocation that afflict the poor in any unequal society. He grew up in a family of Irish immigrants who had suffered the stresses of pre-Famine and Famine times and the upheaval of emigration. This multiplied his problems. His attempt to leave his background and find a new life in the army clearly failed to bring either ultimate security or fulfilling relationships. William Raftery was classically one of the chronic victims of the harsh environment of Victorian Britain.

[1] In January 1851 Thomas Raftery was summonsed for running an unregistered lodging house. StaffordshireAdvertiser (SA), 1 February 1851

[6] WO Chelsea Pensioners, British Army Service Records, 1760-1913, Attestation record of William Henry Raftary (sic), FindMyPast database accessed 15 February 2016. His height was five feet and his chest measurement was 34½ inches.

[8] He may, of course, have been serving in home barracks to replace others soldiers from the regiment who were sent to Egypt. This account prefers to believe Annie, however.

[9] WO Chelsea Pensioners, British Army Service Records, 1760-1913, Attestation record of William Henry Raftary (sic), FindMyPast database accessed 15 February 2016.

[10] Deaths, Walsall Registration District, October-December 1905, 6b/403, William Rafferty (sic), aged 54. William Raftery is the only obvious candidate for this record, despite the variation in surname.

Many of Stafford’s Irish immigrants came from an area of about 20 miles radius round the town of Castlerea in Co. Roscommon. This week’s post looks that area before the Famine because it was the terrible conditions there that led to the migrant connection between Castlerea, England and Stafford.

Castlerea is about 32 miles north-west of Athlone and 40 miles north-east of the city of Galway and is close to the borders of north-east Galway and south-east Mayo. Today the landscape of the area is unremarkable, even monotonous. In the low-lying hollows raised bogs developed and spread to cover large parts of the district. Outside the bogs there was fertile land, and the lowlands east of the River Suck on the edge of the district contained some of the best grazing land in the west. Nevertheless much of the area was of inferior quality – bog-strewn, treeless and gloomy. Today the district seems quiet, remote and thinly populated, but it was not always so. In the first half of the nineteenth century the Castlerea district was densely peopled and home to thousands of poverty-stricken families.

The key to this situation was the land system. In the seventeenth century the assertion of Protestant dominance over Ireland after the rebellion of 1641-52 and the Williamite victory in 1690 meant local Catholic landowners had all or substantial parts of their estates confiscated, the land going to Protestant adventurers, officers and soldiers, incoming Catholic landowners who had been dispossessed in the east of Ireland and, finally, merchant families from Galway city (the so-called ‘tribes’). Many of the surviving Catholic families, though not all, later became Protestants. By the early nineteenth century most landlords in the area cared little about their land as long as rents continued to roll in. Where landlords were absent the management of their estates was usually put in the hands of agents or the land was rented out on long leases to middlemen. Agents were often incompetent, corrupt and oppressive and many lazy landowners adopted the second course, and renting out blocks of their land on long leases to middlemen. For the mass of the population it was a pernicious system. In 1832 local writer Isaac Weld wrote:-

“the principal cause of distress [in Co. Roscommon] may doubtless be traced to the injurious practice of granting leases for long terms. …. Landlords in chief have lost power and control, being little more than receivers of rents on their estates. …. It is by the petty landlords that the mischief is done; themselves under-tenants to others, perhaps three or four deep, and in many instances but little removed from the condition of those whom they oppress or grind.”[1]

The middleman system meant a hierarchy of tenants with each layer paying the profits of the layer above. After 1815 the Castlerea district, in common with much of rural Ireland, entered a period of acute economic and social crisis. At one extreme in the Castlerea area there was a relatively small number – perhaps 2,000 – of commercial farmers whose fortunes were determined by the market economy of Britain and Ireland.[2] They occupied about one fifth of the land. At the other extreme vast numbers of people – about 250,000 – lived in a more or less subsistence economy. They desperately needed land on which to grow basic foodstuffs, above all potatoes. The two groups interacted. The farmers and landowners needed the labour power of the subsistence peasants whilst the latter needed wages or labour service to pay their rents, tithes and for goods and services. Barred from the best land, they had to compete for the poorer lands, bog margins and bogs not occupied by the commercial farmers.

There was a hierarchy of tenants in the competitive struggle for scarce land. This is that can be demonstrated by families whose members later settled in Stafford. In 1825 Darby Dolan rented 78 acres in Tibohine parish to the north of Castlerea.[3] This was a substantial holding, and Dolan was probably doing quite well. He doubtless sublet some or all of it to those doing less well. In other words, Dolan was a middleman and the Dolan family could well have been local power brokers. It was this that meant the immediate landlord of most Catholic sub-tenants was likely to a fellow Catholic. In contrast, in 1833 Patrick Cuncah, or Concar, rented 88 acres south of Castlerea in Boyounagh parish.[4] It was a similar-sized holding to Darby Dolan’s in Tibohine but here the similarities ended. Concar was part of a “company” of tenants who leased land in partnership and were part of the clachan and rundale system of communal farming settlements that had expanded in the west of Ireland since the seventeenth century. The system was both a response to, but also helped sustain, Ireland’s massive population growth since it allowed dense occupation of marginal land based on the intensive production of the potato for food and turf from the bogs for fuel. As the population rose land holdings in the clachans were divided and divided again and new clachans established on even more marginal areas.

Potato plots and cabins, Co. Roscommon (Illustrated London News)

In the nineteenth century landlords began to break up the system and replace it with direct leases to individual small-holders. In 1833 Thomas Raftery & Co. continued to hold 23 acres in partnership in Kiltullagh parish west of Castlerea but Pat and James Raftery leased 31 and 32 acres individually, and most of the extensive Raftery clan’s holdings in the parish were individual.[5] At Cloonfad in Tibohine parish four members of the Corcoran family were also individual tenants of five or six acre small-holdings. Co-partnerships could be of minute size. In Moylough parish, Walsh & Co. rented just four acres between them in 1837, but that in turn was bigger than the minute plot rented by John Featherstone at Knockroe in Castlerea in 1832 – just one fifth of an acre.[6] People like Featherstone were at the bottom of the land hierarchy in the Castlerea area.

The growth of population sustained by potatoes grown on marginal land, together with the shift from communal land holding to market-driven individual tenancies, produced a massive and tragic army of landless people. Although the big estates and grazing farms needed labour available on demand there was never enough paid work to sustain even a fraction of the available labourers or keep individuals in work all the year round. In 1836 only about one in ten labourers had any sort of regular employment and 8d a day was the maximum they could expect to earn.[7] Such families still needed ‘conacre’ land on which to grow the potatoes essential to survival. Under the system of conacre minute plots were rented just for the season to provide a subsistence crop, and by the pre-Famine period the landless were so desperate for conacre that landlords and middlemen routinely charged exorbitant rents for it. In 1836 conacre in Templetogher and Boyounagh parishes was costing up to £8 an acre, whilst in Kilkeevin (Castlerea) £9 9s was charged for the best land and £6 6s for bad and moor land.[8] By 1845 rents of £13 an acre were reported in the district.[9] Tenants were usually unable to pay all their rent with hard cash and that meant their labour that was essentially available free on demand to the landlords or their agents. In 1826 Gibbon wrote of

“Big Dick Irwin, who was agent to the Dillons of Belyard, in this county, [who] for forty years got his turf cut, saved and finally left in his haggard, and his potato and other requisite labour done without one penny of expense through the whole year – a gross imposition on the tenantry of this weak absentee family.”[10]

The rents charged for conacre were also extortionate because it was at the frontline of the conflict between the expansion of commercial farming and the land hunger of the mass of the population. Landholders became increasingly reluctant to let land for conacre. This kept prices up, and the rent spiral was worsened because there was no open system of conacre land valuation. It was merely let to the highest bidder, and since demand outran supply tenants were competing with each other, thus forcing prices up.

The three decades from 1815 to the outbreak of the famine were crisis years for the mass of people living in the Castlerea district. The end of the Napoleonic wars brought agricultural depression. Prices tumbled in the livestock and produce markets and tenants of all classes, but especially the poorest, could no longer afford the high rents. Rent arrears spiralled and this undermined the financial basis of many of the landlords, particularly those who had mortgaged their estates to support profligate expenditure on the basis of future income. The response of more vigorous landlords was to take direct control of tenancies, break up co-partnerships and combine small farms into larger holdings. Small tenants lost their land. In one instance the results were described by a Church of Ireland rector, Rev. William Blundell:

“In Baslick parish …. some of the tenants have gone to beg and some have got small-holdings on other estates: in Kilkeevin parish the holdings have been increased from a rood to three of four acres; those that have been dispossessed are located about Castlerea; many of them beg.”[11]

In 1845 Joseph Sandford of Derry Lodge (Tibohine parish) described the process in more detail:

“They [the landlord or agent] generally pick the best tenant; and if there is waste to the farm, or anything of that kind, they put those they cannot accommodate on the waste land, and give them the edges of bogs and so on. The country people term it transporting them; they are banished to some corner of the bog.”[12]

Population growth drastically worsened the prospects for people in the area. In the three parishes of Kilkeevin, Baslick and Ballintober the population rose from 4,821 in 1749 to 17,141 in 1841.[13] The population explosion increased pressure to subdivide holdings and worsened the hunger for land at the same time as the economic depression undermined tenants’ ability to pay the rents demanded. The population of the Castlerea area rose by a third from 186,538 in 1821 to 246,434 in 1841, and by the latter year the population density was 221 people to the square mile. Things were actually worse than this because the rural poor could occupy neither the best grazing land nor the worst of the bogs. In Kilkeevin parish, for example, the actual density on settled land was over 400 people per square mile.

Cabin in Connemara, 1880s. An indication of conditions in the Castlerea area before the Famine.

Living conditions for the mass of people were appalling. Evidence collected by the Royal Commission on the Irish Poor in the 1830s showed a picture of miserable housing and poverty.[14] The cabins in which most people lived were usually built of bog sods, mud or dry stones without mortar and thatched with any vegetation available, even potato stalks. They were cold, damp, dark and smoke-ridden. Cabins often had minimal furniture – even bedsteads were a rarity, most people having to make do with straw on the floor and with hardly a blanket to cover themselves. William Bourke, parish priest of Templetogher and Boyounagh reported that the housing was

“Most wretched, built of sods or sometimes mud, of stone very rarely; furnished? oh! Bedsteads, such as they are, very rarely enumerated, or to be found amidst the cabin furniture; a damp floor, a wad of straw or undried rushes, perhaps a sheet and a thing that was once a blanket, surmounted by the rags worn in the day, form the couch of the cabin’s inmates”. [15]

The people living in these hovels subsisted almost entirely on a diet of potatoes and often went around in rags. Thomas Feeny, parish priest at Kiltullagh, said that

“Their ordinary diet is potatoes, and sometimes buttermilk, and sometimes a salt herring; their condition with respect to clothing, is miserable; coarse frieze is what they use for a body-coat, and the coat is generally ragged.”[16]

This picture of a potato diet, with or without occasional buttermilk, eggs and salt fish, was general throughout the area, and some descriptions of the peoples’ clothing were even harsher. In Kilmovee, Co. Mayo, the priest Robert Hepburne said that “their clothing generally [is] so wretched as to render it difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain its colour or quality.”[17] In 1829 Skeffington Gibbon described the typical scene as he saw it in Co. Roscommon:

“In the County of Roscommon …. there is not in Europe a more poor and wretched peasantry. …. See the huts and the few wattles that alone prevents them from living as miserable as the Hindoos or African tribes, who have the advantage of a sultry climate; their little fire placed in the middle of a crib, supported by a few loose stones at the back – and the smoke, from the stinch (sic.) of weeds and what is called mud turf, is quite intolerable, and changes the very aspect and caps of the females to yellow hue – distorting their countenances and making their eyes a reddish colour. Their fare is nothing but potatoes, and in general not even a sufficiency of that useful and nutritious vegetable; and at night nothing to lay their weary limbs upon but a wad of straw or damp rushes generally termed a shake-down. These people suffer such privations.”[18]

At least a third of the population were living in the worst windowless one-roomed mud or dry stone hovels and conditions for the rest were little better.[19] Over 90% of the population lived in 3rd and 4th class houses; only the landowners, commercial farmers and traders could aspire to anything more.

The appalling conditions in which a majority of the people lived reflected the poverty endemic to the land and labour system. In forty parishes out of fifty two in the region the correspondents said in 1836 that the poverty of the people had worsened since 1815, and in only three was some improvement reported.[20] In next week’s post we look at what people did to survive this situation.

[7]Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, 1836: Appendix D: Baronial examinations relative to the earning of labourers, cottiers etc., (HC1836 XXXI.1): Cos. Galway, Mayo & Roscommon baronies. Responses to Q. 1, “How many labourers are there in your parish? How many are in constant and how many in occasional employment?”

[9]Royal Commission of Inquiry into the State of the Law and Practice in Respect to the Occupation of Land in Ireland (The Devon Report), 1845, Minutes of Evidence (HC1845 XXXI.I); evidence of Dominic Carr, agent to Lord de Freyne, Frenchpark, pp. 373-7

[10] Skeffington Gibbon, The Recollections of Skeffington Gibbon from 1796 to the Present Year 1829, (Dublin, 1829), p. 167

[19] In 1851 the census attempted to classify housing, dividing it into four classes:-

4th class: mud cabins having only one room

3rd class: mud cottage, 2-4 rooms and windows

2nd class: good farm house or house in s small street; 5-9 rooms with windows

1st class: all houses better than the preceding

No similar classification was adopted in 1841. An average of 20% of houses were “4th class” in the baronies of the Castlerea district in 1851, but conditions must have been far worse in 1841, since it was the poorest occupiers of 4th class housing who disproportionately suffered in the Famine. It is therefore assumed that 80% of the decline in house numbers between 1841 and 1851 was the loss 4th class cabins through death, eviction and emigration, and this suggests that in 1841 an average of 35% of houses were of the 4th class.